One thing that Penny and I cannot refuse is a rescue. So when we had a call about aa tailless gecko that had come home from Spain in a suitcase, we were on our way.
On our arrival we were greeted by a very excited and wonderfully concerned man, who talked us through the entire gecko discovery and the drama that ensued. Apparently, this gentleman’s family were not reptile fans and his dear wife was very loud with objections to the small lizard and frankly, terrified.
We managed to identify the species as the Moorish gecko Tarentola maurinautica a small common species of wall gecko from mainland Europe. Certainly not an animal we were going to release onto our dark and chilly island and wish the little bugger luck.
Penny and I are well versed in this particular species, we already have one. An adolescent male that is missing his rear left foot. Penny and I describe him as the 3-foot gecko much to our friend’s confusion –
“a three-foot gecko? That’s huge! How did it get so big?”
Makes us chuckle every time.
So we had Footsie and now we had Stumpy. Footsie lives in a vertically themed semi-arid bioactive enclosure with too many hiding places to count. Thermoregulation gradient, humidity gradient and flies. He loves flies. Next question would be – can an adolescent Moorish gecko live with a tailless, stressed, much smaller adolescent Moorish gecko?
We were going to find out.
The beginning of the end
Naturally, the first thing I did was put both geckos together in a small enclosure while I ripped their soon-to-be home apart and rebuilt it.
Sounds crazy, I know, but it didn't take long and the geckos were too stressed to be overly interested in each other. Mostly they hid and avoided me, actually sheltering behind the same small piece of cork bark in their desperation not to be seen.
Build done, flies of both small and medium sizes added, it was time to introduce the geckos.
Little Stumpy went in first. Smaller, faster and slightly less crazy when handled—not that I recommend handling any Tarentola species—followed by Footsie. I should probably mention at this juncture that Footsie is well known for defending himself violently from anything he perceives as an attack. He bites. He death-rolls. He screams bloody murder.
Imagine attack 100 – damage 0.
He's tiny, but he thinks big, and I respect that.
Footsie was in. Stumpy was in. We had food in excess, UV and heat exposure in abundance, more than twenty hiding places that I'd deliberately built into the enclosure, and probably twice as many that the two of them would either discover, invent on the spot or simply materialise from unexpectedly.
There was no shortage of resources and no shortage of places to get away from each other.
So what would happen now?
Disability access
I should mention that Footsie's missing appendage does absolutely nothing to dissuade him from believing he is the most fearsome and agile gecko ever to walk the earth.
Tokays? Got nothing on this boy. Leachies? Bunch of overblown omnivores. Green eye geckos? Temu knock-off tokays.
Footsie is a master of disguise, an expert-level hider, a champion at sitting still, and no gecko in heaven or on earth can outcompete him in doing absolutely nothing. So his next move really made me sit up and pay attention.
He sat out on a branch.
And started clicking.
Footsie was vocalising in a way I had never heard from him before.
Now, Moorish geckos are a vocal species. Calls can be associated with territorial interactions, courtship and mating, as well as defensive or distress situations. In other words, Footsie clicking at this particular moment could have meant several things, and unfortunately, he wasn't particularly interested in clarifying which one.
Had I messed this up?
Had Footsie hopped into his newly rebuilt enclosure and immediately started declaring that everything the light touched was his? Was he communicating with Stumpy? Did he know something I didn't? Or was he simply shouting at me because I'd spent the last hour stressing him out?
I didn't know.
So I watched.
What’s mine is mine
Once Footsie had finished shouting at nothing in particular, or shouting at Stumpy, or shouting at whatever the hell he was shouting at, he retreated to a nook high up in the enclosure. Stumpy was already nestled away in a lower hiding spot, presumably waiting for nightfall before venturing out to explore.
Sensible, this one.
Footsie continued throwing baleful glances my way until I got uncomfortable and left.
After lights out, I sat down again and watched, desperate to see something that would tell me whether I'd got this completely wrong or whether these two might actually work together.
Stumpy ventured out first and immediately started hunting the flies that were roughly his size. He was hitting them one after another, taking a dozen large fruit flies without breaking stride. It was impressive, but perhaps not unexpected. Stumpy hadn't been bred in captivity. He'd been accidentally captured and transported into it. For a gecko his size to have survived perfectly well before somebody inadvertently packed him for a holiday to Britain, he clearly knew how to hunt.
Footsie became increasingly alert to Stumpy's movement and then he started hunting too.
But what was he going to hunt?
Footsie was also accidentally kidnapped from his wild home and transported into captivity, although his journey had been considerably less pleasant. His rear left leg had become trapped in the zipper of a backpack and remained there all the way from the south coast of France. That's why Footsie only has three feet.
It has never stopped him hunting.
And Footsie doesn't bother with Stumpy's tiny fruit flies. This boy can take considerably larger prey.
He stalked down through the branches, moving slowly and deliberately. Eyes fixed on his target. Everything we'd seen since Stumpy arrived had me watching very carefully indeed.
Then came one quick, violent movement.
A large fly was grabbed, dismembered and eaten with brutal efficiency.
He was hunting flies.
For the moment, Stumpy was safe.
So what next?
There continues to be peace and calm in what Penny and I now lovingly describe as Cripples Corner. This isn't entirely fair, as Stumpy's tail will eventually regrow. That’s what caudal autonomy evolved to do after all.
Footsie's missing toes and pads unfortunately won't, so I suppose the motif still has some merit.
I monitor their interactions as often as I can. I make sure food is always available, that water isn't something they need to compete for, and that there are more than enough hiding places for either gecko to escape the other whenever they choose. Effectively, I've tried to remove as many reasons for competition as possible.
And, so far, it seems to be working.
They don't need to share food. They don't need to share water. They don't need to fight over the best hiding place, and neither animal is forced into proximity with the other simply because there is nowhere else to go. They have the opportunity to interact, but just as importantly, they have the opportunity not to.
Coexistence certainly seems to be on the cards for my two Moorish geckos.
But that's an observation of these two animals, in this enclosure, right now. It isn't evidence that every pair of Moorish geckos can be thrown together and expected to get along, and it certainly isn't a guarantee that Footsie and Stumpy will continue doing so indefinitely.
Because, as any keeper worth their salt will tell you...
shit changes quickly.
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